The World Is Burning - Fire and Climate Crisis from the Mediterranean to the US West Coast

The World Is Burning - Fire and Climate Crisis from the Mediterranean to the US West Coast

By : Environment Page Editors

Unprecedented waves of forest fires are remaking landscapes, politics, and communities globally. For many, these fires stress that the politics of the climate crisis are no longer the concern of a few, but urgent questions for all. But what precisely are the connections between climate and fires, and can we disentangle those connections from other causes? How do these fires push us to reconsider conventional ideas about nature, society, and power? This roundtable brings together scholars of Lebanon, Palestine, North Africa, and global arid lands, to reflect on the local and transnational ramifications of forest fires, burning practices, property regimes, and techniques of environmental control in the context of the climate crisis.

Panelists


Zena Agha
 is a Palestinian-Iraqi writer from London. She is a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and previously served as the US Policy Fellow for al-Shabaka; the Palestinian Policy Network based in New York. Her areas of expertise include climate change and Palestinian adaptive capabilities, British and Zionist colonial cartography, satellite imagery over Palestine-Israel, and Israeli spatial practices. Zena's writing has appeared in several international publications including The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Independent, and Foreign Affairs and her media credits include the BBC World Service, Voice of America, and BBC Arabic. Zena is the recipient of numerous fellowships including the Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School and the Asian American Writer’s Workshop. She was awarded the Kennedy Scholarship to study at Harvard University, completing her Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies.

Diana K. Davis, a geographer and veterinarian, is Professor of Geography and History at the University of California, Davis. Her most recent book is The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (The MIT Press, 2016). Her first book, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Ohio University Press, 2007), was awarded three book prizes in geography and history and translated into French.  Her other works include the co-edited volume Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Ohio University Press, 2011) and over 40 articles and chapters.  She has conducted fieldwork with Afghan nomads near Quetta and Moroccan nomads south of Ouarzazate, and held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the SSRC, the EPA, and the ACLS. 

Salma Nashabe Talhouk is a Professor of Landscape Horticulture in the Department of Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management (LDEM), in the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences (FAFS), at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon. Her focus is on community stewardship of natural resources, digital technology and nature conservation, and cultural ecosystem services. She has published over fifty peer-reviewed articles, supervised / co-supervised seventy graduate students, taught fifteen different courses, and produced more than thirty short documentaries on local green initiatives in Lebanon. Talhouk is the founder of the AUB Nature Conservation Center; she served as LDEM chairperson, and as FAFS Associate Dean. Currently, Talhouk is founder and Chair of the AUBotanic, she is a member of Ecosystem Services Partnership steering committee, and she is leading the development of Daskara, a nature and culture phone application. Talhouk wrote a children's Arabic alphabet nature book and translated Dr. Seuss’s Lorax into Arabic and she produced a book on the trees of Lebanon.

Gabi Kirk (moderator) is a PhD Candidate in Geography with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research at the University of California, Davis. Working between political ecology, feminist geography, and geographies of colonialism, her dissertation project examines how Palestinian farmers and sustainable development organizations in the northern West Bank use agro-ecology in projects of identity formation and struggles for sovereignty. She also has a project on the critical history of agricultural science which looks at transnational circuits of agricultural and infrastructural expertise between California and Palestine from the 19th century onward. She has a personal and intellectual interest in interrogating Zionist claims to “Jewish indigeneity” through environmentalism. She has published academic and popular pieces in Journal of Political EcologySociety and SpaceJewish Currents, and PROTOCOLS.

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    • Roundtable on Capitalism and Climate

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Politics in the Time of Corona: Tehran (Hosted by Jadaliyya Co-Editors Noura Erakat and Bassam Haddad)

From Tehran: 27 March 2020
For audio only, find the podcast on SoundCloud.

This podcast takes you to several cities/countries affected by Covid-19 to discuss social, economic, and political challenges facing their societies, with emphasis on the most vulnerable groups and on what this pandemic reveals about the human condition (wow, big phrase). Based on personal and incisive conversations with various interlocutors on location, we hope both to learn from others and to provide some solace as we address how we are collectively experiencing and dealing with similar challenges.

We will be speaking with our guests, one or several at a time, via Skype, and will try to have brief, informative, and non-draining calls within 20-30 minutes.

Look out for upcoming episodes in the coming week(s) from Iran, San Francisco, Vancouver, and more. Listen to the previous episodes in the series on Gaza hereDublin here, and Cairo here.

Hosted by Noura Erakat and Bassam Haddad
Production Set by Khalid Namez
Edited by Alicia Rodriguez
Directed by Bassam Haddad
Research by Naim Mousa 

Stats: Iran

Data shown is as of March 29.

  • Total confirmed cases: 38,309
  • Total deaths: 2,640
  • Total recovered: 12,391
  • Total cases per 1 million people: 456
  • Total deaths per 1 million people: 31
  • First case recorded on February 19.
  • About 6,000 people are being tested daily (This data is based on an article written on March 14).
  • Estimates put the death toll at around 3.5 million by late May, when the outbreak is expected to peak.

Alex Shams


Alex Shams is a writer and PhD student of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research is focused on sacred space and pilgrimage in the Middle East. He is also an editor of Ajam Media Collective, an online platform focused on cultural and social issues in Iran and Central Asia. He is based in Tehran

Hoda Katebi


Hoda Katebi is an Iranian-American writer, community organizer, and creative educator based in Chicago.

Bassam Haddad


Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of the forthcoming book, A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Forthcoming, Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine. Bassam is Co-Project Manager for the Salon Syria Project and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI).  He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book tittled Understanding The Syrian Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).

Noura Erakat


Noura Erakat is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice where she teaches topics such as human rights law, humanitarian law, national security law, refugee law, social justice, and critical race theory. Her scholarly interests include humanitarian law, human rights law, refugee law, and national security law. She earned her BA and JD from Berkeley Law School and her LLM in National Security from the Georgetown University Law Center. She is a Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine. Prior to beginning her appointment at GMU, Noura was a Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple Law School and has taught International Human Rights Law and the Middle East at Georgetown University since 2009.



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